You’ll often hear a lot of FUD on the internet, but one of the biggest culprits has to be the on-going plasma vs. LCD debate. The majority of the negative points about plasma are just not true, and someone is going to have to debunk them, so here are the six most common myths about plasma TV’s, debunked.

Short TV lifespan. You’ll often hear people saying that plasma TVs last a lot shorter than LCD and CRT based TVs. This is a complete myth. The majority of modern plasma panels now boast a 60,000 hour half life1 which if you work it out, is nearly 14 years of watching the TV 12 hours a day, or almost 28 years if you watch the TV six hours a day. I don’t think the majority of people will keep their TV for 14, let alone 28 years.

Plasmas suffer screen burn. This may be the case if you leave your plasma panel on 24 hours a day, seven days a week on the same TV channel or game. But again, current generation panels do not suffer from screen burn nearly as much as they used to2 and I happily watch BBC News 24 and other such channels with static content without problems.

LCDs are sharper. While technically true as LCD pixels are more clearly defined than plasma ones, you can only notice if you stand less than a metre away from the TV. At a true viewing distance, there is no distinguishable difference between an LCD and plasma with the same resolution.

LCDs have better colour. LCDs are possibly the weakest technology when it comes to colour reproduction. They have a small colour gamut, smallest out of all the current screen technologies3 and also one of the poorest black reproduction (black looking grey). Currently one of the best technologies for colour fidelity and accuracy is plasma.

Plasma technology can’t bulid as big panels as LCD. Panasonic make an 108-inch plasma panel. While it’s prohibitively expensive at $69,999.95, it does show the potential of the technology.

You can’t get a full HD plasma. Pioneer, Panasonic, Hitachi and Fujitsu now offer full 1080p plasma panels.

If you followed anything remotely related to British popular music culture, then you know of Top of the Pops. Even five years ago, it was the de-facto program to springboard your new release. They had the biggest stars in the world appear on it, and it was seen as a great honor.

Even though it first aired in 2004, I hadn’t even heard of Wonderfalls until just a few weeks back. I was browsing around the Radio Times website, when I saw it as recommended viewing on Sky One. Seeing as I don’t have Sky One anymore, my only option was to either buy Sky One again, or buy the DVD boxset.

You probably would’ve thought me as crazy for buying a $30/Â£20 DVD boxset without seeing the show, or even knowing much about it, but I did. With some rather poor shows from the US, I should’ve been skeptical about this, but I just wasn’t. Something about this show just caught my attention, like many recent US comedys/dramas such as 24, Nip/Tuck, Enterpriseetcetera have just shown me that drama and comedies are still very strong in the US.

My expectations for this show we’re pretty low actually. I had really no idea what it was about apart from that it was based around Niagra Falls. What greeted me on the first episode was not so much an episode introducing the characters, themes and plots, but rather forcing them onto me by witty dialog, an ironic and sarcastic Jaye played by Caroline Dhavernas and a rather qwerky plotline. You’ll quickly get engrossed on this plotline, which has just enough tension and twists to keep you interested, but still leaves room for the free, fluid and airy nature of the show.

I’ll leave the reviews to the people on IMDB and TV.com who are much better at it then I am, however I do encourage you to watch this show first before reading the reviews as there will be some spoilers out there.

But I’ll once again plug the DVD boxset of this show, or encourage you to watch it on Sky One. This is your one chance to catch this, as Fox decided to cancel this excellent show. It’ll become clear why they did in episode four, exorcisms, the Devil and God all play a part in this episode, which is why the narrow minded and right-wing executives of Fox Television decided to cancel probably the one truely original show this year. But it does not aim to offend and any intelligent person would not be offended by it.

I’d like to note that I refrained from making any puns of the shows title throughout this post.

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